See What Happened When Feminists Squared Off With Hugh Hefner in 1970

Four years ago Susan Brownmiller, one of feminism’s most articulate and visible activists, disappeared into the library stacks. She surfaced last fall with Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement. Brownmiller’s meticulously researched book—a kind of Whole Earth Catalog of man’s inhumanity to woman or, as Novelist Lois Gould called it, “everything one never wanted to know about sex”—may significantly change the terms of the dialogue between and about men and women. Many shrink from her conclusions: that marriage as an institution has its historical roots in the fear of rape; that the rapist is the ultimate guardian of male privilege; that rape is “the conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” But she persuasively argues that all forms of oppression have their origin in the often brutal reality of unequal physical power and that this primal fact of life continues to define and distort relationships between the sexes.